by I want to help every single subscription box owner in this group have the most successful Q4 they have ever had before.
If you play your cards right during this time of year, you can achieve some serious growth in your Subscription Box Business.
(The key here is actually playing your cards right)
If you want to achieve some serious growth and your entire marketing plan is “posting some organic posts” on your Facebook page, you may as well shut up shop and take the rest of the year off!
I am not looking to offend anybody with this post, but what I am saying is simply the truth!
Plus, I want to help you get a lot of Subscribers signed up this Q4 (and making consistent organic content with no results leads to burnout and exhaustion)
It’s highly unlikely doing this on its own is going to drive any kind of meaningful growth (In fact, you could argue doing it on its own is probably a complete waste of time)
How do I know this?
Well, my company BusterBox, has over 80,000 followers on social media, and the amount of sales we get from organic posts is very small.
Why is this the case?
Well, organic reach is absolutely tiny these days, and only a very small amount of your followers actually see your posts.
There are things you can do to warm up your page to get better engagement (which does help a bit), but not enough to get any kind of consistent and meaningful growth.
See, to scale up a Subscription Box (Or any business for that matter), you need a profitable, repeatable and scalable way of acquiring customers.
There are many marketing channels and strategies that can achieve that, but for the purpose of this post, I am focusing on Facebook Ads.
It’s 2023 (about to be 2024), and Facebook ads are still the best and most cost-effective way of acquiring customers (for the majority of Subscription Box companies)
We use a lot of marketing channels in BusterBox, but Facebook ads are still our best-performing channel (We have acquired over 50,000 customers from them)
And after speaking to a lot of big subscription box companies over the last few years in lots of different niches (revenue ranging from $1 million to over $100 million) I would say 99% of them achieved the majority of their growth using Facebook ads.
So, if you want to grow a highly successful Subscription Box Business that will change your life, it is a good idea to develop your skills and get very good at running Facebook ads.
We get a lot of subscribers signed up from Facebook ads every single day, and we are always testing new things. I am about to share what is working now.
(So, hopefully, you can take this information and apply it to your own Facebook campaigns and have your best Q4 so far)
Remember: If you don’t run your ads correctly, you will get poor results, and you will burn money.
Remember: If you don’t run ads, please ensure you have another repeatable, profitable and scalable way of acquiring customers otherwise, you will probably end up stuck in the mud for a long time.
Remember: If you hire the wrong person to run your ads, you will get poor results, and you will burn money.
(There are a lot of pretenders out there these days who don’t have a clue about advertising and will position themselves as “experts” and will actually send your money up in smoke)
Remember: If you run your ads correctly, you will get a lot of subscribers signed up and essentially change your life.
This simple campaign set up below is getting us 50-100 subscribers signed up per day from Facebook ads.
1. Offer.
If you have followed me for a while, you know I always go on about the offer. That’s because it is absolutely essential if you want to grow a highly successful subscription box business with a customer acquisition cost that actually makes sense financially.
We test a lot of different offers In BusterBox.
At the moment, if you sign up for 6 or 12 months, you get a free smart doorbell. (We position this as a way to stop your dog from going crazy barking when somebody is at the door, but it is a cool product in general)
These days, offers are more important than ever because of the economy and the amount of noise on social media!
You need to find a way to grab attention, cut through the noise and get your customers to sign up in massive volume for a cost that makes sense, and a good offer will do this.
We lean into this heavily, and that is a big part of the reason we are the biggest dog toy and treat subscription in the UK and Ireland!.
There are many different offers you can test. Here are a few.
1. Double first box for free
2. Free gift (has to be something very appealing)
3. Deep discount (negatives and benefits to this)
4. Free digital products
If you want to learn more about what offers work, check out some of my other content on my blog or search this group where I discuss this in detail.
Remember, though: Offer is very important, and if you try to run ads with one that does not convert, your CAC will be very high, and your volume will be very low (Basically, you will burn money)
When you get the offer right, though, things change quickly, and it becomes a lot easier to get a lot of subscribers signed up for a pretty low CAC!
2. Targeting
If you are not targeting the right people, it really does not make a difference how good your offer is or how good your ads are. You will be flushing your money down the drain!
Example. Imagine you owned a dog subscription box but just targeted cat owners.
Is there anything you could do in your ads to get these people to sign up?
Probably not, because they don’t own a dog.
You need to take this kind of thinking into every single campaign you set up. You have to target the correct people, and your messaging has to be right for them.
Correct targeting + message market fit = Lots of success
Thankfully, these days, Facebook has made targeting a lot easier, and if you are running awhile, you can test open targeting, and that will probably work well for you.
(This is when you leave Facebook to do the targeting for you, but you may need some purchase data on your account for it to be effective)
Other audiences that are very effective are lookalikes. (Yes, they still work very well in 2023)
My advice is to refresh all of your lookalikes for Q4 because things have changed on Facebook in the last few months, and if you are still using older lookalikes, the data probably isn’t the best, and your performance won’t be the best.
If you are only starting out and you can’t use open targeting, and you don’t have enough data to make lookalikes, then my advice is to test interest-based targeting (Yes, interest-based targeting is still working very well in 2023)
If you are in a very mass market niche, it will probably be obvious which interests to test first.
If you are not in a mass market niche and it is not obvious, then you will have to do something I call “the dirty work”
It’s essentially getting a survey out to your ideal customers via influencers, Instagram shout-outs, posting in groups etc… and building up a customer profile.
Then, taking that information to Facebook and building a custom profile (or turning it into a lookalike audience) which can work really well.
There are many ways you can do this, but you have to get your targeting right if you want to get any results!.
3. Structuring Your Campaign
99% of the time you are going to optimise for purchase conversions (Unless you are doing a very particular strategy) Any other “objective” is basically the equivalent of putting your money into a bag, then going to the local field and then setting it up in flames!
(Honestly, you would be better off setting it up in flames because at least it would be somewhat entertaining for a few minutes LOL)
Facebook has made it very clear.
If you want sales, you go for the purchase conversion objective that’s it.
This way, you are targeting people who are actually likely to respond to the ad and buy (Facebook collects this information and puts different kinds of users into buckets)
Yes, targeting this bucket may be a bit more expensive (But the people in it are actually buyers!)
You could pick a different objective (where the bucket is cheaper), but the users aren’t buyers, and you just get a load of window shoppers over to your site!
(I know what I would prefer: pay a bit more but actually get sales)
As far as ABO / CBO, just pick what works for you. Usually, ABO is best for smaller budgets and testing ads, and then when you have your winner, you can go to CBO to scale.
(If you have been running awhile and you know the kind of ads that work, you can just jump straight into CBO, so you don’t waste your time doing any kind of unnecessary testing when you could be acquiring a lot of customers instead during Q4)
As far as the number of ad sets goes, that depends on your budget and goals. You can’t have 15 ad sets running if you are only spending $30 per day. (As there won’t be enough budget to spread)
I would recommend keeping to a low enough number, 3 -6 these days is normally a good choice (Unless you are spending a lot of money)
4. Writing Ad Copy That Converts
I could talk about copywriting all day and give you “a million tips”, but let’s keep this simple.
Yeah, sure, you can use AI to help with your copy, but honestly, don’t be one of these companies where you depend on it for everything, and you end up with some “vanilla garbage”, or it sounds like “R2-D2” wrote your ads.
It’s a tool (a great one at that), but there is so much low-quality copy out there these days because people are lazy and depend on it for everything and don’t use original prompts to give it some character.
That’s good news for you, though. (Because if you put a bit of effort into your copy, you can stand out on the newsfeed, beat your competition and get a lot of people signed up to your box)
We could spend all day on this, but here is a simple framework to follow!
1. Pattern Interrupt – This is how you grab attention on the newsfeed. (No attention, No sale)
2. Offer – This is where you hit your customer with that unbelievable offer
3. What You Do – Explain your box does and what benefit the customer will get.
4. Social Proof – You need social proof to sell things online (Reviews or anything you have been featured in can be mentioned in the ad)
5. Call To Action – Tell the customer to sign up and create some urgency if possible
5. Images & Videos That Convert.
User-generated content works very well for images. You can turn multiple pictures that get sent in from your customers into a collage.
The best way to get these pictures is to run a best picture competition with your subscriber base, and they will send them in.
Other images that convert are ones with the offer in the text, packed boxes and colourful backgrounds (that’s explaining it on a very basic level)
Videos can be done in a million ways. The easiest ones are UGC content. You simply record the box being opened and go through the products one by one and mention the offer! (Obviously, that is a simple way of explaining it but it works)
When it comes to videos, I normally don’t even bother with influencers anymore. I just write a script and get somebody with a dog to do the video when I am in the room to ensure it’s perfect.
(We have been doing this for about 5 years, and this strategy has acquired thousands of subscribers and generated millions in revenue)
I recommend you do the exact same for your video ads this Q4.
I hope you found this post helpful. Obviously, there is a lot more to this, and each section can go into way more detail, but what I just covered on its own will help you big time this Q4. I hope you have a very successful few months and get a lot of new subscribers signed up.
